Are You Prepared for the Revised EEO-1 Reporting Requirements?
Have you thought about what changes you may need to make to your payroll system and/or human resources information system (HRIS) in order to comply with the recently revised EEO-1 reporting requirements? If you have 100 or more employees (or if your company is affiliated with other entities in which there are a total of 100 or more employees), you may be subject to these new reporting obligations.
Private employers who are subject to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and have 100 or more employees have long been required to file annual EEO-1 Reports, reporting on the race, ethnicity and gender of the employees in their workforce, grouped together by ten (10) job categories established by the EEOC (the “EEO job categories”).
Starting with the 2017 EEO-1 Report, those employers now will need to include information regarding annual employee pay and work hours, aggregated by race, ethnicity, gender, and EEO job category. Fortunately, the filing deadline for the EEO-1 Report has been changed from September 30th of each year to March 31st of the succeeding year, so the 2017 EEO-1 Report will not be due until March 31, 2018. However, if these revised requirements apply to your company, you should start now to make sure your payroll and/or HRIS systems are set up to capture all the information that must be included in the revised EEO-1 Report.
The previous EEO-1 Report required employers to select a pay period between July 1 and September 30 of each year and report on the number of males and females of each race/ethnicity the employer had in each of the 10 EEO job categories. The new EEO-1 Report will require employers to break this information down further into twelve (12) pay bands, starting with the lowest pay band of $19,239 and under, and going to the highest band of $208,800 and over. The number of employees will be based upon a pay period between October 1 and December 31, but the salary information must include pay information for the full calendar year, using information reported in Box 1 of the employee’s W-2.
Employers also will be required to provide aggregated annual work hours for employees broken out by race, ethnicity, gender, EEO job category, and pay band, using total hours worked during the calendar year. “Hours worked” is defined consistent with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). For employees who are non-exempt under the FLSA, employers are already required to maintain records regarding each employee’s work hours under the FLSA. For exempt employees, an employer may report actual hours worked if the employer accurately maintains such information; alternatively, the employer may report a “proxy” of 40 hours per week for full-time exempt employees and 20 hours per week for part-time exempt employees multiplied by the number of weeks the individuals were employed during the year.